Water, Rock, and the Ozark Landscape: A New Direction

Since I started this blog several months before The Mississippi was published in 2010, I have concentrated on issues facing the Mississippi River and the Gulf Coast and it has been a gift that keeps on giving. I have written about the recent drought that brought the river so low that the Corps of Engineers had to blast rocks out of Thebes Gap. The BP oil spill in 2010 was a treasure trove of material for months. My last post was on the St. Johns Bayou-New Madrid Floodway closure, a bad idea that keeps coming back, the way so many ideas for altering the river and its wetlands do.

In 2001 during a low period in my research on The Mississippi, I ventured down into Madison County, Missouri and discovered the Silver Mines Shut-in along the St. Francis River. I made a great photograph on that October day and returned to the shut-in almost weekly for the next six months, studying the fall of light and color on this place. You can see these images at MissouriOzarkPhotographs.com. At the same time I began making photographs of other shut-ins in the St. Francois Mountains of the Missouri Ozarks.

These days I am working full time on the Missouri Ozarks. I call the project, Missouri Rocks. I plan to devote this blog to what I am learning about the interplay of water, rocks, and the Missouri Ozark Ecosystem. Unless, of course, the Mississippi provides another gift.

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